‘Night Shift’ Gets Adrenaline Flowing on NBC

The Night Shift Eoin Macken, left, brings baggage from Afghanistan to his San Antonio hospital job, on NBC.

Lewis Jacobs / NBC

By NEIL GENZLINGER

May 26, 2014

The medical crises are rapid-fire and improbable, and the doctors who deal with them are easy-to-grasp cutouts in “The Night Shift,” a medical drama starting on Tuesday night on NBC that is akin to beach reading. There is plenty here to get your adrenaline flowing but not much to tax your brain.

The setting is an emergency room in San Antonio, and several of the doctors working the overnight shift are from nearby military bases and have served in combat zones.

That’s fortunate, because people in the San Antonio area apparently have a knack for getting themselves injured in ways that require the skills a doctor hones by treating roadside-bombing victims on the fly in Afghanistan. A tree branch through the stomach. An arrow through the chest (because Texans, according to this show, like to hunt wild hogs while drunk).

Such emergencies are perfectly suited to the gonzo approach of T C (Eoin Macken), who brings battlefield triage skills and perhaps some post-traumatic stress disorder to the job. The crew also includes his buddy Topher (Ken Leung); his ex, Jordan (Jill Flint), who in the opening episode is put in charge of the night shift; and Drew (Brendan Fehr), who practices mixed martial arts to relax, because that’s what tough guys do.

The characters all have back stories that dribble out in between or sometimes during the endless gatherings around a patient’s open chest cavity, but they all feel familiar and obligatory: the closeted gay man, the tightly wound administrator whose family life is falling apart, and so on. The show works the battlefield-trauma thing a lot, trying to exploit the sympathy and admiration we all feel for actual veterans, but television writers have gone to that well too often at this point, and it’s starting to feel exploitive, especially when so many fine documentaries exist featuring real soldiers, not actors playing make-believe.

In short, don’t look for the depth of “House,” “Grey’s Anatomy” or other top-flight medical dramas here. But if preposterous, pulse-pounding pileups of bizarre accidents and obscure medical conditions appeal to you, sure, put the trashy beach novel aside and help yourself.